In the current development within vehicle technology there is an increasing interest in enhancing the safety and the manoeuvrability of vehicles by means of a number of support systems. Examples of well-known support systems in wheeled vehicles are anti-lock brake systems (ABS), traction control systems and tire pressure estimation systems. This kind of systems are usually provided with more or less complex sensors such as gyroscopes and wheel speed sensors to gather information about physical parameters affecting the vehicle.
Along with the development of technology there is an increasing demand for safety enhancing equipment in standard cars, something which is not always compatible with an acceptable price level on this segment of cars. There is therefore a need for developing cost efficient sensor equipment while improving the usability of the sensor signals.
An important parameter for automatic support systems, such as dynamic stability traction control (DSTC), is the course direction of the vehicle. The course is usually expressed in terms of the yaw angle, which is the direction of motion relating to a longitudinal axis of the vehicle, and the yaw rate, which is the angular velocity of the rotation of the vehicle around its centre of gravity in the horizontal plane.
In a simple approach, the yaw rate is independently calculated from different sensors in the vehicle, such as a gyro sensor, ABS sensors, an accelerometer sensor or a steering wheel angle sensor, and thus resulting in different values of the yaw rate. These values have been compared and voting has been used to decide which information to use.
Sensor signals generally comprise a parameter value and an offset from the true parameter value. The offsets are due to imperfect knowledge of the parameters and their dependencies, and the offsets vary in time due to for example temperature changes and wear. An accurate estimation of the offsets is crucial to the ability of accurately estimating the parameter value itself. The traditional way to improve sensor signals is to use a low pass filter in order to get rid of high frequency variations, and sometimes an offset can be estimated using long term averaging. Averaging has its shortcomings. For example in yaw rate estimation, a systematic circular driving will give the same effect as an offset. Furthermore, if two sensor signals measuring the same physical parameter are averaged, an improved estimate of the parameter may be obtained but it does not help in estimating the offset.
The perhaps most well known support parameter for the driver of a wheeled vehicle is the velocity. The vehicle velocity may be estimated based on the angular velocity of the driven wheel, however with an inaccuracy due to wheel slip, wheel skid or varying tire diameter. The standard approach to compute velocity is to use the wheel speed signals from the wheel speed sensors and possibly averaging over left and right wheels. To avoid errors due to wheel slip the non-driven wheels are preferably used. This approach has however shortcomings during braking when the wheels are locked and during wheel spin on 4 wheel-driven (WD) vehicles. For 4 WD vehicles an additional problem is that even during normal driving there will be a small positive velocity offset due to the wheel slip.